Where Is The Friend's House?

Ahmed has taken his friend's notebook home by mistake. The teacher has said that any boy who fails to do his homework in his own notebook again will be expelled. So the child walks to the next village to give it back. That is the entire film, and Kiarostami builds real tension out of it. The two boys, Babek Ahmadpour and Ahmad Ahmadpour, were not professional actors. The title comes from a poem by Sohrab Sepehri. This is the first film of the Koker trilogy. And Life Goes On followed in 1992, made after the 1990 earthquake that hit the region, with Kiarostami following a director driving out to look for the children from this film. Through the Olive Trees closed the trilogy in 1994. So the first film is a fiction, and the second is that fiction colliding with an actual disaster. Who it is for: viewers drawn to moral stubbornness seen from a child's height, and anyone looking for a way into Iranian new wave cinema. Who it is not for: people who want incident and pace. The film is almost entirely walking, and that is the point.